Inventors' Blindness
Howard Aiken of IBM once said: "No more than six computers shall ever be sold in the commercial market." The irony of this comment is that Aiken was the person who designed the IBM's first ever computer.
Great inventors often are so immersed in their own ways of thinking that they fail to see the practical potential of their own creations. In fact, it even applies to people like Thomas Elva Edison, who combined imagination with practical common sense. Edison was not an unworldly person. He was practical enough to patent all his 2,500 odd inventions, and even started the company (which later grew into General Electric) to manufacture his patented invention of bulb. Nevertheless, when he invented phonograph (the earlier day version of record player), he commented: "The phonograph... has no commercial value."
What applies to individuals also applies to large, successful, and often innovative organisations. A large number of innovations, which became the cornerstone of modern personal computing (e.g., bit-map display, windows, mouse, etc.) were invented in Xerox's research facility at Palo Alto (PARC), California. But Xerox was focused on photocopier market. It used these technologies for developing internal systems, not for developing marketable products. When Steve Jobs of Apple visited PARC, he was dazed by the market potential these invention had. He lured away many PARC researchers, and that is how, windows and mouse found their way in Apple's Lisa model.
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